A Master Healer with a World of Experience
We’ll begin with the wisest words I’ve ever heard spoken: Let the earth carry you.
It was the early 1990s, and I was in Peru for the first time. At over 15,000 feet, I couldn’t catch my breath and I was sure I couldn’t take one more step.
An elderly indigenous man strode easily beside me. “Mamita,” he said, “You’re walking on the earth. Just let Pachamama carry you.”
Ever since that moment when I found the strength and trust to climb my first Andean Mountain, I have been learning to let Mother Earth carry me, to carry my practice as a healer, and to carry this evolving work that we call Chumpi Illumination.
Healing Work that Blends the Practical and the Mystical
I am a healer, teacher, and an alchemist.
Though I have spent much of my life studying the spiritual traditions of indigenous cultures around the world and speak the language of interdimensional consciousness, I also work to root us into the here and now. We need to embrace this chaotic modern world with all of its beauty, conflict, and contradiction, not flee from it.
Healing flows when we blend the mystical and the practical. We must stand in presence with all that is in order to address the spiritual, psychological, emotional and physical challenges of today.
Spiritual Foundations Grounded in the Earth and the Cosmos
It never felt right to study one particular spiritual path or follow only one spiritual lineage. Instead, I listened to the call to sit with teachers from across the world. The land itself is my teacher, especially the sacred mountains, or apus, that surround Cusco, Peru.
My first visit to Peru was like a great spiritual homecoming. My heart was thrown open as I explored ancient temples, meditated on mountain tops, and experienced visions at the edges of lagoons. Over the years, I have sat with many indigenous healers, including the Q’ero elders Don Manuel and Don Mariano Turpo, the keeper of the Rainbow Lagoon at Ausangate. He taught me how to enter into true, lasting harmony with all that is.
I have returned to the Sacred Valley just about every year since then, often making a solo trip as well as leading a group journey to Peru. It’s the people and the culture, as well as the way that those mountains act as great channels of universal energy, that bring me back again and again.
Energy Medicine that is Anchored in Experience, Intuition, and Science
When I went to Peru for the first time, I was already a world traveler. In my twenties, I spent three years traveling by Land Rover, exploring Eastern and Western Europe before moving on to Morocco, Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal, and India. (This journey is detailed in my 2012 spiritual memoir, Standing Naked In Rose Petals.)
When I returned home, it was clear I had been transformed, and my work had to transform too. I would leave behind my work as a Russian translator and public school teacher and begin to build my qualifications as a healer and a teacher of healers.
I now have over twenty-five years experience as a Health Kinesiology practitioner and am one of the few authorized HK trainers in the US. The art and science of muscle testing is an integral part of my healing and my teaching because it’s so important to support intuitive work with subtle energies with the quantitative power of kinesiology.
All Roads Lead to My Life’s Work, the Healing System Called Chumpi Illumination
In my most recent book, Divine Embodiment: The Art and Practice of Chumpi Illumination, you can read about my first experiences with the Chumpi stones, the sacred healing stones of the Andes.
Found at ancient temples and other holy spaces across Peru, the stones are revered, but nearly all of the wisdom associated with their original use and purpose has been lost. Since I received my first set of stones nearly thirty years ago, I have explored further and further and studied all that I could about them. Beginning with what I could learn from the elders and archaeologists, I then relied upon insights from universal mystery traditions and channeled wisdom. It became clear that were were intended to work with twelve stones and each one represented a different facet of human consciousness.
As you’ll read in the book or when you take a class with me, the qualities of the thirteenth stone are just beginning to emerge.
Let’s Journey Together
My greatest teachers have been my students and clients.
As I say at the beginning of the new book, CHILL was birthed through encounters and celebrations with the people I have met in my countless trips to Peru, and also through interactions with those who have come to the Sacred Center in Warwick, NY over the years.
I invite you to visit me at the Sacre Center, either as a student in the Healing Arts & Mystery School or for an individual healing session.
Or, let’s travel together. Join me on our next adventure to Peru.